The chronological starting point for this connection is a passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. I address this passage in my first chapter and don’t want to anticipate too much of that argument here. Briefly, however: the passage claims that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality as divine punishment for worshiping statues. This is an odd moment in an odd but brilliant writer. Paul’s particular way of articulating same-sex acts and idolatry posits the former not only as the enemy of the unrepresentable God but also, more strangely, as his counterpart, a situation that continues in later descriptions of sodomy as the unspeakable vice. Sodomy is thus placed in that “beyond” of representation known as the sublime. More specifically, it is brought into proximity with a Hebraic sublime, associated with the Mosaic ban on images. Hebrew scripture has been associated with the sublime ever since Longinus and is cited in the writings of eighteenth-century writers on the sublime such as Burke and Kant. But it was Hegel who, in his Aesthetics, ties the concept of the sublime most intimately and powerfully to Hebrew scripture. I shall discuss Hegelian sublimity in my chapter on Freud, but I should also say that it influences this entire book, though sometimes only implicitly.
My thesis is that Paul’s equation of sodomy and sublimity in Romans is elaborated by medieval theologians and given aesthetic form by Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Sonnets, in turn, powerfully influence Oscar Wilde’s later “invention” of homosexuality as both an identity and an aesthetic. The emergence of modern homosexuality does not cancel the older ties between sodomy and sublimity, however, but simply reworks them in new guises. Freud’s little book on Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques Lacan’s writings on sublimation in his Seventh Seminar exemplify this. I would claim, then, that the four works examined in this book are not randomly chosen but form part of a coherent tradition, a tradition I could easily have extended both laterally and forward to such contemporary writers as William Burroughs. I have limited myself to a few outstanding instances, however, on the theory that less is more.
Earlier I made the somewhat tongue in cheek remark that writers of treatises on aesthetics do not spend much time discussing sodomy. This is not to say that the issue of homoeroticism does not ever put in an appearance. Here I shall note two moments in which homosexual desire inflects the concept of beauty in philosophical aesthetics, as a kind of general prologue to my more specific investigation of sodomy and the sublime. The first example comes from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). At the beginning of the Third Part of the Enquiry, Burke first turns to the concept of beauty, which he defines as “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it” (83).2 He adds that he “confine[s] this definition to the merely sensible qualities of things” (83), meaning that he speaks of a love that attaches not to the personalities or the spiritual qualities of loved persons but only to their visible attributes as bodies. It might seem, then, that when Burke speaks of “love” he means “desire,” but he insists that this is not so:
I likewise distinguish love, by which I mean that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, of whatsoever nature it may be, from desire or lust; which is an energy of the mind, that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects, that do not affect us as they are beautiful, but by means altogether different. We shall have a strong desire for a woman of no remarkable beauty; whilst the greatest beauty in men, or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing at all of desire. (83)
Having first defined the beautiful as that which causes love, Burke then defines love, tautologically, as the mind’s reaction to beauty. The two examples by which he proceeds to distinguish love from desire are parallel but asymmetrical to the logic of his argument. The “woman of no remarkable beauty” arouses desire but not love. She therefore falls outside the sphere of Burke’s investigation entirely. Although she plays the functional role of distinguishing an aesthetic passion or sensation from a non-aesthetic one, she is not herself a proper object for aesthetic contemplation. By contrast, the man (or animal) who causes love but not desire does constitute a legitimate object for aesthetic reflection—doubly legitimate, in that he provokes the proper impulse and does not arouse the improper one. The very possibility of the beautiful as something that excites a passion distinct from desire therefore depends on the nonexistence of male homoerotic desire. This is not just a case of any absence, but of a determinate absence that nevertheless provides a structural support. Burke could easily have found exemplary objects—a vase, a flower—in which the question of sexual desire would not have arisen at all. But he seems compelled to bring the question of beauty into dangerous propinquity with lust so as then to purge it as best he can.
Purgation, as we shall see in my chapter on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, plays an important role in the aesthetic tradition that this book explores. Burke’s contrast between the beautiful man and the “woman of no remarkable beauty” recalls, in fact, the Sonnets’ pairing of the beautiful young man and the so-called Dark Lady, whose “face hath not the pow’r to make love groan” (131: 6) but who nevertheless exerts an inexplicable sexual attraction on Shakespeare and, moreover, draws to herself all the sodomitical attributes that are carefully expunged from the young man. Burke does not mention sodomy directly in the opening passages on beauty, but by linking (non-)desire for men with that for animals, he obliquely evokes the fact that English law had for centuries united homosexuality and bestiality under the category of “buggery.” (A statute passed in 1533, for instance, outlawed “the detestable and abhomynable vice of buggery committed with mankynde or beaste.”)3 Burke therefore knew, and indirectly tells us he knew, that same-sex desire was possible, since the very existence of buggery laws attests to it. But such desire will be definitionally excluded from the field of the aesthetic.
Having made, as best he can, the requisite distinctions to define beauty, Burke sums up:
Which shews that beauty, and the passion caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire, though desire may sometimes operate along with it; but it is to this latter that we must attribute those violent and tempestuous passions, and the consequent emotions of the body which attend what is called love in some of its ordinary acceptations, and not to the effects of beauty merely as such. (83)
In provoking “violent and tempestuous passions,” desire spawns a turbulence more akin to the sublime than to the beautiful. Male homoerotic desire simply does not exist for Burke, but if it did, its passions would seem to be allied with sublimity. For what it is worth, a few pages before the beginning of Part Three, Burke notes that bitter tastes and stenches, including “the bitter apples of Sodom,” induce “ideas suitable to a sublime description” (78).
My second example comes from Hegel’s discussion of Greek statuary art in his Aesthetics. For Hegel, Greek art supremely embodies the ideal of the beautiful in which visible form and a richly determined and individualized consciousness harmoniously combine. In a section entitled “Particular Aspects of the Ideal From in Sculpture,” he undertakes to itemize those formal qualities of face and body that elevate Greek art to its ideal status. Before beginning, however, he discharges an intellectual debt:
If we turn now to consider in more detail the chief features of importance in connection with ideal sculptural form, we will follow Winkelmann in the main; with the greatest insight and felicity he has described the particular forms and the way they were treated and developed by Greek artists until they count as the sculptural ideal. Their liveliness, this deliquescence, eludes the categories of the Understanding which cannot grasp the particular here or get to the root of it as it can in architecture [mathematically]. (727)4
Hegel borrows liberally from the catalogue of statuary facial features and body parts in Winkelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1765), though his analysis rarely follows his predecessor’s. The distinctive qualities of Greek art that Hegel claims to learn through Winkelmann is “their liveliness, this deliquescence” (Die Lebendigheit, dies Zerfliessende). Both Hegel and Winkelmann distinguish Greek statues from their Egyptian forerunners on these grounds. But “deliquescence” also glances at the homoerotic element in Winkelmann’s work. The History of Ancient Art elevates the figure of the eighteenth-century